Mr Nourbakhsh claims that the money will be spent neither on pre-election handouts nor on the grandiose industrial projects that have been a weakness of some previous governments.
The design of these programs largely avoids election-year handouts to well-off voters.
India's ruling Congress party presented an idea Tuesday that it hopes will win it the next elections: cash handouts sent directly into the bank accounts of poor people, replacing a corrupt and inefficient web of subsidies and rations that often fail to reach the intended beneficiaries.
He described the government's failing as legion and metastatic: glaring corruption; a president whose confidants comprise drug lords and war criminals; provincial and district leaders who live off US handouts ; an election dominated by fraud and discredited by low voter turnout.
Voters, especially rural ones, expect cash handouts before elections.
Voters may oppose venality, but at elections they accept politicians' handouts.
In a recent speech the prime minister, Julia Gillard, primed Australians not to expect a pre-election budget full of handouts.
For more than seven decades, the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI, has used handouts and election-year public works projects to keep control of the most depressed and isolated parts of Mexico.
In the meantime, she added, the city had taken other steps to assist South Asian voters in recent elections, which included distributing handouts with the names of candidates translated into Bengali; providing interpreters in Bengali, Hindi and Punjabi at select polling sites; and advertising coming elections in a Bengali-language newspaper.
The opening speech at the trade fair traditionally has been used by Greek prime ministers to offer handouts, particularly before elections.
Amid the talk of change in Saturday's elections, Pakistan remains a place where handouts can decide votes and lawmakers are sought out for protection.
